e-reader

Richard Nash has a great round-up of the conversations and opinions about digital that took place all over this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair.

…we’re not replacing one static-priced unit (pBook) with another static-priced unit (eBook), but finding that our single massive unidirectional pBook supply chain is now just one component of a tremendously variegated set of producer-consumer relationships and each producer is therefore going to need to offer the consumer a range of pricing models: subscription, rental, per unit download, advertising, serialization, fewer or more guarantees of ownership (as opposed to personal license) rights. And other yet to be named or thought up!

Nash gives us some pretty clear advice to take away:

This is happening now, the future is already here.

Everyone can benefit, no-one is exempt.

The transformation is irrevocable, continuous, multivalent, and potentially asymmetric.

All of which underlines something that’s been reverberating around in my skull lately. We keep talking about digital publishing like it’s a bolted-on addition to our traditional business practice. If publishers, authors, booksellers and other actors in this industry are going to embrace, even transcend, the tenets above, we have to stop differentiating digital from other parts of our business.

Digital media now flows through our organisations the same way information does, the way money does. It is spread through our daily practices in ways many are not even aware of, from the literary agent who tweets to the editor who reads manuscripts on an e-reader, from the bookseller using Facebook to promote literary events to the author moderating a social network of fans and readers.

It’s not about digital publishing anymore. It’s just publishing. Maybe not even that. It’s media. It’s one professional and commercial facet of human communication. Perhaps thinking within this framework will help us find the new business models we’re looking for.

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